I got told today I shouldn’t raise kids because I’d purposefully raise them in a vegan household, without animal products of any sort. I was told this would be dangerous and unfair to the kids.
It was a weirdly direct thing for this person to say to me (one of my coworkers). It’s stuck in my head. I was told I should let my potential children choose what sort of morals they have, even though this person is raising their kids Catholic. Their advice to me was to allow my potential kids to choose every night between a meat-based meal and a vegan meal (???). And several other coworkers agreed. Where do they come up with this? No carnist raises their kids like this.
So is anyone raising vegan kids or does anyone know about what it’s like? Or was anyone here raised in a vegan household?
Millions, if not billions of people and families around the world have vegetarian or vegan diets because that’s their food heritage, and because access to animal products is rare where they live. Children grow up eating that food because that’s what it is: food. No questioning about alternatives or dual-meals (Wtf).
It’s rather colonialist and eurocentric to assume that raising a kid vegan/vegetarian is somehow an innovation or something out of the norm, when it’s not the case for most of human history and population.
our household is all vegan. my partner went vegan as a teen. they were patient with me as I eventually drifted away from animal products and went vegan when our child was small. our child was raised vegetarian from day 1 but never really took to eggs and cheese in the first place. they’re 99% vegan now, except for the odd halloween candy. we’ve been clear about where animal products come from without watching dominion/earthlings.
these days dairy and eggs but meat especially elicit an ‘ew’ reaction. there’s one other kid we know that is mostly if not entirely vegan. there’s a vegetarian out there or two. while lots of people including families we know eat vegan meals without pitching a fit, I don’t know of any other vegan households. the vast majority of other kids are carnists and my child has described that as ‘weird’. it hasn’t been a big point of contention with friends or internal anxiety so far, thankfully. our kid knows it’s a choice and that if they fuck up and eat animals by accident that’s nothing to be ashamed of, but they also know that we’d be disappointed if they choose to stop being vegan.
all this ‘omg kids are vegan’ shit is a bullshit dodge, just another type of carnist brainworms and deflection from people’s own discomfort with self criticism and personal moral reckoning. veganism isn’t hard to explain to kids. it’s a pretty clear narrative - so many kids books are about animals and nature as friends that deserve life and respect. not eating them is less confusing. the fucked up part is explaining how the vast majority of people don’t give a single flying shit. I try not to be too hard on the issue when it comes to other people, partly out of some kindness to my past self, partly because I don’t think it’s fair to instill distrust of 98% of people in a child just because they aren’t vegan.
diet-wise obviously it’s fine for kids to be vegan. it’s as healthy for kids as you make it. there are all kinds of vegan garbage food to eat as well as lots of healthy stuff. our kid is a picky eater but I bet that’s true irrespective of carnist or vegan. salt and sugar and carbs transcend all diets. it sucks that processed vegan foods aren’t subsidized the same way that dairy and meat are because it’s harder to get kids into lentils than plant hot dogs and plant mcnuggets but it’s not a big deal.
I don’t have kids (yet?) but I was raised vegetarian (Indian upper caste family). A vegan diet can be easily adapted for a child’s needs. I think it’s good that the (uncalled-for) remark by your colleague made you think about this, it means that you care about this issue more deeply than most people do, who just feed kids what they are cooking for themselves. I think the point that another commenter made about getting kids exposed, in a safe way, to allergens is very important. I’d even go far as letting them eat meat very very occasionally - who knows, there may be a time in the future where your need to survive will be against your need to be vegan.
I actually started eating meat after I moved out of India, and I’m hoping to shift to a vegan diet when things are more stable in my life. But personally, even if I don’t ever eat any other kind of meat, I want to be able to eat beef, in some symbolic and meaningless way at least. Hindu vegetarianism is a toxic thing, it is absolutely not about not harming animals but about upper castes adopting a “pure” diet, and even then they make exceptions because that is how this bullshit works. I loathe the way Indian vegetarianism is mentioned in a positive way without these aspects being known. The same vegetarians will never give up milk, even though they know about the hell a cow has to go through. In India, you are judged by your dietary habits, you may not be able to rent if you eat meat. I’ve seen my friends in school getting bullied because they got some meat for lunch. Sorry for this off topic rant, but had to vent.
I’m with you through so much of this but you’re really gonna be a “I’m gonna eat TWO steaks cause you don’t eat any!” person to own the Hindus? Why not just assert total moral superiority over them going vegan, knowing milk is murder and abuse?
It’s not about owning Hindus though. Let me give you some context. In Karnataka, an important South Indian state that the BJP (the far-right Hindutva party) won some time ago, there was a quite popular free lunch program, provided by the previous government. Their idea was to make poor kids feel like there is some point in going to school, and at the same time fix nutritional deficiencies. One of the items in the lunch would be a boiled egg, which you could refuse if you wished. Eggs being a cheap and great source of protein, made it an easy fix for the carbs heavy Indian diet. BJP comes in, and removes this option, largely due to pressure from their upper caste electorate, who mostly wouldn’t even make use of the free lunch, but can’t cope with children eating eggs, which are considered “non-veg” in India. In some sense, BJP could be seen as lessening the suffering of chickens, but I would never accept this kind of reasoning.
Beef is effectively banned from being sold and even eaten in like >80% of India. It’s not just enough that Hindu upper castes, who have a religious obligation to not eat beef (even this is debatable), but they will not let Muslims and Christians, who have no such obligation, eat beef. People get routinely lynched to death because they are suspected of “trafficking” beef. If you get the cops to bother to look into this, they send the meat to a lab to know if it is indeed beef. This is the level of insanity that Indians have to deal with. And some BJP supporters have now started talking about how this is good for the planet and cuts down on animal suffering, as if keeping cows in factory farms and getting them raped repeatedly so they can be milked efficiently is somehow better.
If animal suffering is the only thing you are considering, then it shouldn’t matter if you are being forced into not eating meat or not. Personally, I want to eliminate meat from my diet but I will stand for a person’s right to eat meat. I realize this is an odd stand, and it is possibly even inconsistent, but I hope I have explained where it is coming from.
